Efficient line functions are crucial to a company’s ability to deliver goods and services to customers, and employers must create specific goals, cultivate the right attitudes among employees, and implement contingency plans to protect against interruptions. Each company must create functions that address its specific objectives to ensure success and avoid losing customers.
Line functions are activities that directly impact a company’s ability to deliver goods and services to customers in an efficient and timely manner. Should a factor within the business structure interfere with such a function, the end result is usually a short-term loss of revenue and possibly the permanent loss of a customer or customers. For this reason, most companies strive to structure their actions in such a way that each line function within the organization is able to continue to be productive, even when unforeseen situations threaten to interrupt it.
In order to design an effective line function, an organization must first identify its goals, as well as define its corporate culture. For example, if your organization’s goal is to deliver goods to customers a full twenty-four hours before one of its competitors is able to do so, decisions must be made about how to achieve that goal. This leads to cultivating specific attitudes among employees who will engage in the delivery process, as well as reworking existing delivery strategy so that efficient delivery is consistent. Only when the right objectives, the right employees and the right process are in place can the line function be fully complete and efficient.
When creating a line function, employers often pay close attention to several factors that could threaten the efficiency of that process. In response to these factors, it is not uncommon to implement backup strategies, sometimes referred to as contingency plans. For example, if a significant number of employees are ill at the same time, other employees are trained to step in and manage the activities necessary to keep the line function and production totals within standards.
The exact structure of a line function varies from one business type to the next. What works very well in one environment and produces results considered excellent may be completely inappropriate for another type of business. While it is possible to learn from the structure of line functions used within similar companies, each company must spend time creating functions that address the specific objectives of that business.
Protecting the line function from failures is the key to the success of any enterprise. When something threatens to slow or interrupt that function, the future of the business is put at risk. This often comes in the form of situations and events that directly affect the relationship between the company and its customers. At best, failure of the line function causes customers to lose confidence in the quality of the relationship. At worst, it means losing customers to your competitors. Often, the task of recovering a lost client can be time consuming and resource intensive, with no guarantees that the relationship will ever fully recover.
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